by Beth Miller
‘Weird topic, Mum, under the circumstances.’
‘I know, but it’s relevant.’ I filled the washing bowl with warm soapy water. ‘Your dad and I met when we were very young. I’d not been at university long, I was nineteen, maybe twenty. He was older, a postgraduate, doing business studies. He seemed ancient but he was only twenty-six.’
‘You’ve told me this before. I still think it was a bit creepy that he picked you up when you were a first year. We were warned about that at uni.’
‘It wasn’t like that. The art department used to hold these mixers, cheese-and-wine evenings, seems awfully quaint now. It was the height of sophistication to me, coming from the back of beyond in the Wirral.’
‘What if you didn’t like cheese or wine?’
‘You were out of luck. It was, here’s a lump of cheddar, here’s a glass of wine from a box, now go mingle.’
‘Sounds wild.’
‘Actually, they were pretty effective mixers, because there was always a lot more wine than cheese. I went to one with Rose, and your dad was there.’
‘Great story, Mum.’
‘I haven’t finished.’ I plunged a plate into the bowl. ‘Anyway, we started going out, and things went along fine for a few months. But then I met David, who was friends with a girl in my halls.’ It felt so strange to say David’s name out loud to one of my children. Like breaking a taboo.
‘Oh yes? David. I haven’t heard of him before.’
‘He was the same age as me and super-handsome.’
‘Have you got any photos?’
‘I do, actually. Back ho… back at the house. You know I studied art and photography. In fact, I was offered an apprenticeship in a photography studio when I graduated.’
‘Wow, really? I didn’t know that. Did you do it?’
‘Er, no. I didn’t graduate, remember. Anyway. I got on really well with David, I liked him a lot. Then one night we had a few drinks in the Students’ Union…’
‘Oh my God!’ Stella put her mug down so fast she spilled tea on the table. ‘You’re not going to tell me that David is my father?’
I shivered, but I don’t think she noticed. ‘No,’ I said, with more emphasis than I intended. ‘Richard is absolutely your father. Here’s a cloth.’
‘Thanks. Phew.’
‘Anyway, David confessed he’d liked me for ages but hadn’t wanted to say anything because I had a boyfriend.’ I thought back to that evening, one of the most amazing of my life, the memory of it glittering still, undimmed by time. ‘So the very next day I finished with Richard—’
‘Hang on a minute, you and Dad split up? I’m confused.’
It was a while since I’d given this account out loud, and I had to think for a moment. What came next?
‘And I had a blissful few weeks with David—’
‘Gah, TMI,’ Stella said.
‘And then I fainted on my way to a lecture, and discovered at the GPs that I was pregnant. With Richard’s baby.’
‘Ah, enter Baby Edward stage left.’ Stella rolled her eyes at the thought of her brother. ‘Hang on, though – how do you know that the baby was Dad’s?’
‘Oh, it was the timing. It was too far on to be David’s. And anyway, we…’ I hesitated, wondering if this was overdoing it, ‘David and I had only just started, you know… we were taking it slow.’
‘Mum!’ Stella put her hands over her ears. ‘Lalalala!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Didn’t you think to pretend to David that it was his?’
‘Certainly not, Stella!’ I rubbed at a non-existent stain on the table so I didn’t have to look at her.
‘It’s incredibly common, though, isn’t it?’ Stella sipped her tea. ‘What’s that statistic about a huge proportion of people who think the wrong man is their father?’
I moved on hastily. ‘Richard was thrilled to have me back. He knew I’d want to keep the baby, being Catholic, you remember what my mum was like.’
‘Nonetheless, I can’t wait to tell Eduardo that he was nearly an abortion.’
‘Stella, that’s horrible, and he wasn’t. I never even considered it. Your dad asked me to marry him, and although it was starting to be more acceptable back then to be an unmarried couple with a baby, it wasn’t that common. So, we got married, and my parents were delighted. Richard’s mother of course, that was a different story.’
‘Gran likes you now, though. Well, she did, before you…’
‘Yes, I imagine I’m not her favourite person right now.’
‘So why are you telling me this?’ Stella clapped her hands to her mouth. ‘Oh God, he’s the one, isn’t he?’
‘The one?’
‘The other man! You’re going to tell me that David was your one great love, so you’re going looking for him to make up for all the lost years.’
‘Certainly not, Stella. You’re looking for a neat, black-and-white answer in a situation in which there isn’t one. Anyway, that’s not the point, that’s not why I’m telling you this.’ I sat down, and put my hand on her arm. ‘I’m worried about you and Theo.’
‘How are we on to Theo? Why are you worried?’ Stella looked confused. ‘I have to say, Mum, this doesn’t feel like the most urgent item on our agenda.’
‘It’s been on my mind, is all. I’ve been thinking a lot about the folly of settling down too early. You’re so young, Sparkle. I know you two have been talking about getting engaged, but from my vantage point, twenty-three is unbelievably young, no matter how it feels on the inside. Life is long. You need to spread your wings, try out lots of things, try out other people.’
‘Honestly, Mum! Are we talking about me, or you? I’m going to go back to my house tomorrow, and find out if me and Theo have what it takes to last the distance, and I’m going to carry on with the catering business, because I like it, and I’m good at it. I don’t think you should tell me what to do! I’m not the one hiding in an old cottage in the middle of nowhere because I left my home without a plan.’
Stella always did know how to do a walkout speech. She went out, and I heard her stomp upstairs. I thought of Rose telling me to be kind, and realised I hadn’t been kind at all. I went upstairs after her, but hesitated outside her closed door, and decided to at least be patient, which was the other part of Rose’s instructions. Instead, I went into my room, and sat on the grey chair.
I checked my phone, to see if Bear had answered my email. But there was nothing. I switched to contacts, and my finger hesitated over her number. Then I put the phone on the table. If it was a World-Class Emergency, I had to go there.
* * *
What had made me leave? Everyone wanted to know. Was there someone else, had something happened, what was the trigger? As I’d tried to explain to Rose, there were lots of things, an accumulation over many years. But if there was one specific moment, it was the afternoon a few weeks ago, on one of those days when you start looking for something and end up going down a wormhole of memories.
I’d pulled out from under my bed the shoe boxes containing Bear’s most recent letters, to see if she’d said something outright that I hadn’t noticed, or dropped in clues that I’d missed. I can’t explain how odd it felt that she’d not written. We never missed a month. Came close a few times, of course, but as the calendar neared the fifteenth of my month, an alarm would go off in my head, and I’d sit down to write. I assumed it was the same for her. But now three of her months had been and gone.
Hours passed, as I read letter after letter, laughing at things she’d said in response to mine, tearing up at some of the sad bits. There was nothing obvious to explain her silence.
From day one of secondary school, Bear (real name Ursula, which she hated), Rose and I were an inseparable threesome. The best of best friends. For five years we did everything together. I could easily recall the pain I felt the awful day Bear told us her family was moving to Australia. We were fifteen, nearly sixteen. We’d been planning to all go to the same college for our A
-levels. I don’t know who cried more of the three of us. Bear and I made a pledge that we’d write every other month. The first month, she’d write to me, the next month, I’d write to her, and so on. This meant that every year I received six blue airmail envelopes filled with Bear’s scrawling, slanty handwriting, her funny, wry voice, telling me about the horrors – at first – of her new life, and how Sydney wasn’t a patch on Hoylake, which we laughed a lot about later. Then, of course, how she’d settled in, made friends, got herself a boyfriend, loved her college course.
And I wrote back long rambling updates on my life: what Rose and I had been up to, how much we missed her, what we thought she’d say if she was with us, the crazy times we had at college, then later, university, marriage, babies, work, kids… If I ever wanted to write my memoir, those letters would be a priceless resource, assuming she’d kept them, of course. Six letters a year from me to her, six letters back from her to me. Some were barely half a page, when life was busy, scrawled in haste; others four, five or more pages long full of the detail we both craved. They always ended the same way, with our special sign-off, the origin of which was lost in the long years of our correspondence: ‘Till next time. Miss you. Always.’
I’d seen Bear in person over the years, of course. Rose and I went there during our gap year before university: six amazing, sunlit weeks travelling with Bear round Australia. The final night, drunk in a bar in Sydney, we promised we’d do it again when we all finished uni. But by then I had baby Edward, and Rose went alone. After that, children, work and life got in the way, and I’d not been to Australia since. Bear came back to the UK every few years; the last time was maybe three years ago. But those visits were always fleeting and unsatisfactory. She had so many people to see, and often tried to pack the whole of Europe into the trip. But on the page, our love for each other was easy to express; and always the letters came. There must be more than two hundred now, stored in boxes under my bed. We’d obviously both got email at some point, but Bear wasn’t very interested in it, and anyway, neither of us had wanted to stop the old-fashioned letters.
When I went to retrieve the next box, I pulled out instead one I hadn’t looked in for years. I’d cleared Mum’s flat after she died, and saw that this box had my name on the lid in her clear capital letters. I hadn’t yet got round to opening it, and I smiled when I realised what was in there: my youth. Ancient mementoes I could scarcely remember keeping. Photo-booth pictures of me and Bear, programmes for art exhibitions, old birthday cards from friends and boyfriends, including a special one from my mum that made me well up, tickets for gigs I’d been to in the 1980s, including Soft Cell’s last concert, well, their first last concert, ah, that dated me. And some of my old photos taken back when I fancied I’d make a career out of photography, most in black and white, developed by myself at university, including a heart-stopping one of David Endevane, impossibly young and beautiful, all cheekbones and fair hair, like his namesake David Sylvian, the lead singer of Japan. As always, when I thought about David, I wondered what it would have been like if things had been different. Bear was the only person in the world, other than Richard, David and I who knew what had really happened.
At the bottom of the box was something I had forgotten so entirely, it was as though it belonged to someone else. It was a folded piece of yellowing paper, and in my childish writing, with hearts dotting the i’s, I had written at the top: ‘Things to do by the time I am thirty.’ This was underlined twice in red biro. The date: 5 June 1982.
That was the year Rose, Bear and I finished our O levels, and Rose and I went to college. It was the year we turned sixteen. And it was the year Bear emigrated.
Thirty must have seemed unimaginably old when I was fifteen. I was impressed, retrospectively, at the girl who could look into the future and see so far ahead. Teenage Kay must have assumed she’d better get everything done by thirty; for afterwards, there’d be nothing but senility and the grave.
I read the list through, that day that started out with looking for clues about Bear, and one thing struck me right between the eyes: how few of the items on the list I’d actually done. Not by thirty, and not by fifty either. It wasn’t a complete whitewash. I’d achieved the last one, which was ‘have a baby’. In fact, I’d achieved it considerably earlier than young Kay might have envisaged, or wanted. And ‘visit Bear in Australia’ was also a tick, if I ignored the ‘every other year’ at the end of the sentence.
But so many things remained undone.
* * *
Sitting in the grey chair, I looked at the new list in my diary that Rose had helped me write: ‘Things to do by the time I am sixty.’ Climb Snowdon, tick. Visit Bear in Australia, nearly a tick. It was going well. Plus visit Venice and Lisbon, and try living alone for a while, something I’d never yet done. I’d gone from living with my parents to busy shared houses at university, then straight into my first home with Richard, joined a few months later by Baby Edward.
When I went back downstairs, Stella was in the kitchen chopping vegetables. Pans bubbled enticingly on the stove. I loved it when she cooked.
‘Smells delicious,’ I said.
‘It’s only veggie curry.’
‘How lovely.’ I wanted to hug her, but didn’t yet dare. ‘Stella, I was annoying about Theo. I’m really sorry.’
‘That’s OK.’ She looked at me wearily. ‘Mum, it still doesn’t make sense. Do you not miss anything about home?’
My heart ached at how sad she looked. Be kind. ‘Of course, I miss lots of things!’ I sat at the table. ‘I miss my kitchen, and my duvet, and having all my belongings around me. I stupidly left my favourite necklace behind, and my black polo-neck jumper, and my camera. I miss my yoga class, and I’d paid for it until July. I miss my friends, and the honeysuckle in the back garden, because this is the time of year it smells the best. I miss walking down our street to the corner shop, and I even miss Quiller Queen.’
There was a loaded silence, and I quickly went on, ‘And of course, there’s plenty I miss about Dad. I miss our Saturday evenings, glasses of wine in our hands, catching up on our weeks. I miss talking to him about what you and Edward are up to. I miss…’ Wow, this was quite difficult. What else did I miss about him?
Stella tipped the vegetables into a pan. ‘Did you feel this way when Edward and I were children?’
‘What do you mean?’
The veggies sizzled wildly, and she tossed them about expertly with a wooden spoon. With her back to me, she said, ‘Were you wanting to leave the whole time?’
‘Oh, sweetheart, of course not!’ I couldn’t stand not holding her. I went over and put my arms round her shoulders, and she leaned back against me. ‘Of course not,’ I said again. ‘I’ve had loads of happy years – happy times – with you. Having you two children was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It’s only been lately…’ Careful, Kay, no more lies, ‘… it’s only been a relatively short while, really, that I’ve been unhappy.’
Now, at last, Stella turned round, and took my hand in hers. It was so warm and soft that tears sprang into my eyes. It was simultaneously Stella’s hand now, and little Stella’s hand then, holding mine trustingly as we crossed a road.
‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’ she said.
‘I didn’t really admit it, even to myself. I just felt as if, well, as if I was living half a life. Not because of you and Edward, not ever, but because your father and I were stuck in a rut. A dull rut.’
‘Ruts are usually dull, Mum,’ Stella said, letting go of my hand so she could turn the heat down under the vegetables. ‘You don’t hear people talking about exciting ruts.’
I laughed. ‘You always cheer me up, Sparkle. I’m sorry. I never want to burden you with my unhappiness, but I have burdened you anyway, by leaving. Perhaps I shouldn’t have left, after all.’
‘No, Mum.’ Stella looked serious. I loved her sombre grown-up expression, overlaid, like the warmth of her hand, with the child she once was,
playing office dress-up in one of my old suit jackets, the sleeves several inches longer than her arms. ‘If you really were unhappy, it was right to leave. Women should be able to leave, and I know they couldn’t always in the past, like in Gran’s generation.’
‘Thank you, sweetie. I don’t deserve you to be so understanding, but I’m really grateful for it.’
We ate her food together, and I told her about my plan for Australia. She offered, as I’d hoped, to drive me to Heathrow the next day, on her way back to Essex. I hoped the long journey would allow us to talk more with honesty and understanding.
Later, I went up to start packing. It was not quite light, but also not yet dark. I sat in the chair under the slanted window and gazed up into the teal sky. I thought of Bear, and Richard, and David. A flock of birds swirled into view, and I let my worries drift up into the sky with them.
Letter written on 27 June 2017
Dearest Bear,
* * *
Thanks for your lovely card. I still can’t stop bloody crying. I don’t think I did right by Mum at the end, though she honestly had no idea what was going on. I hated that she died in hospital. Not that she loved her flat, but at least she had all her things there. But I was there by her side when she went. I think she squeezed my hand one last time, though it was very faint, and then a moment later, the nurse said, ‘She’s gone, my love.’
There was so much to do for the funeral. It’s lousy being an only child. At least when I go, E & S can argue about who does what. Weirdest of all was getting the death certificate, very formal and alienating. I didn’t ask Richard to come with me, one of the shops is in between managers so he had to cover. Rose came, she was an absolute brick, and afterwards we went to a pub and had three gins each.
Not the chirpiest of letters, sorry, love.
Till next time.
Miss you.